Suicide Forest (13 page)

“Ethan!” Mel said, reaching me. “What’s
going on?”

“Ants! Get back! They’re everywhere! Pack up
the tent. We have to move.”

She was scanning the ground at our feet.

“I don’t see—”

“Go!”

She ran back to the tent.

I jumped atop a rock and told Neil to get my
shoes. He collected them, banged them against a tree, then tossed
them to me. I slapped them against the rock for good measure, then
slipped them on. My right hand was thrumming with heat. I shoved it
under my left armpit.

We spent the next few minutes dismantling
our tents and packing our bags while at the same time keeping well
clear of the agitated colony. My backpack was squarely in enemy
territory, covered by the angry little things, and I decided to
leave it. I would pick it up on the way back tomorrow.

Then, with a last glance at the swarm, we
got the hell out of there.

We
followed the
white string for another ten minutes, to make sure we were well out
of the ant colony’s territory, stopping at an area padded with
spongy pine needles at the base of a one-hundred-foot spruce.

I put my jeans back on and examined my hand.
It continued to throb and had developed dozens of tiny bumps. Neil
had a few bites on his ankles, while Tomo and Mel had gotten away
scot-free.

After we set up our tents again, Mel rubbed
some face moisturizer on my bites, though this did little to soothe
the pain and irritation. Then Neil offered me more whiskey, which I
accepted gratefully.

“What kind of ants do you think they were?”
Mel asked.

“I couldn’t really see the color,” I said.
“They might have been red, or ginger.”

“Killer ants,” Tomo said.

“Fire ants,” Neil said knowingly. “And I
reckon we’re lucky we escaped with only a few bites. They’re
responsible for more human deaths than any other predatory animal
on the planet. Vicious little buggers, they are.”

I didn’t want to talk about ants—I was in
too much discomfort—so I lay back down with my head on Mel’s
backpack and found myself thinking about our ubiquitous companion
Mt. Fuji out there somewhere. We would have been halfway up it by
now. We’d either be in one of the seventh- or eighth-level huts, or
outside them in our tents, trying to catch a few hours’ sleep
before we completed the final leg to the summit.

Would any of us have the energy or desire to
still climb it tomorrow? I wondered. I was pretty sure Neil and Mel
felt similar to how I did: spent, both physically and emotionally.
This had been no stroll through the park. We’d gone a lot farther
into Aokigahara, experienced a lot more, than I’d imagined we
would. Then again, what
had
I imagined? An hour or two hike,
a campfire, marshmallows, ghost stories?

The truth of the matter was that I wanted
this whole weekend to be over already. I was cold and hungry and in
pain and…empty. There was no longer any sense of adventure left
inside me, no curiosity, no excitement. There was nothing. I was
numb.

If Mel’s scare in the hole in the ground had
started me down this track, Yumi’s gravesite, I was convinced, had
been the turning point. Up until then this had still been a game of
will of sorts, like fasting for two days, or swimming across a
small lake. You did it to see if you could. After witnessing Yumi’s
scattered belongings, however, so pathetic, so desperate, it hit
home that this was as real as it got. People did indeed kill
themselves here. They flocked here like lemmings, hundreds if not
thousands over the years, each of them tortured in their own
private way.

And in our ignorance and selfishness we had
come to rubberneck, drawn by the morbidity of the spectacle, just
as motorists slow as they pass a roadside accident in the hopes of
glimpsing something gruesome.

Clearing these thoughts from my mind, I
imagined I was someplace far, far away.

“
You
in the jungle, baby
,” a tinny voice
trilled. “
Wake up. Time to dieeeee!
”

I must have dozed off for some time, because
when I opened my eyes it was fully dark and John Scott and the
Israelis had returned. Everyone was sitting at a fire they had
gotten going. My phone continued to ring—or, more precisely, Axl
Rose continued to sing—which was what had awakened me.

“Ethan?” Mel called over to me. “Your
phone.”

“Yeah, I’m up.” My right hand, I noticed,
had swelled and begun to itch. Ignoring the temptation to scratch
it, I fumbled inside my jacket pocket, flipped open my yellow KDDI
phone, and checked the display. It was Derek Miller, the Canadian
coworker who’d labeled Neil an oddball serial rapist.

Derek and I had an almost nightly ritual.
After we got off work at 9 p.m., we would stop by the Family Mart
down the street from the school, buy a couple cans of beer, Kirin
or Asahi, find a spot off to the side of the stream of suits and
skirts flowing in and out of Shinagawa station, and hang out there
while admittedly looking conspicuous. Regardless, it was
affordable. A beer at a bar, even at a dive, cost about seven
hundred yen, or roughly seven bucks, and it wasn’t uncommon to pay
ten.

In fact, it was during one of these budget
evenings when we’d first met Tomo, who had been doing the very same
thing.

Although it was legal to drink alcohol in
public spaces in Japan, the only people who really did it—outside
of the national cherry blossom festival/drinking party in
April—were foreigners. Japanese tend to worry too much about what
other Japanese think of them. So when I caught Tomo’s eye as he
merrily gulped back a tallboy, I tipped my can to him. He tipped
his back, flashing me his toothy smile for the first time. Then he
did something else that was very un-Japanese: he came over and
started chatting with us. He was funny, Derek and I were having a
good time, and we all bought another round. About thirty minutes
later a girl showed up in hooker boots and a miniskirt. Tomo
introduced her as Minami and invited us to join them at a nearby
bar. It turned out to be packed with other hot university-aged
girls. Some of the guys there thought it was cool to be hanging out
with foreigners and bought Derek and me tequila shots over the next
two hours. All I remember after that was ending up in a
dungeon-themed karaoke room and somehow stumbling back to the
guesthouse at two or so in the morning, to a suitably unimpressed
Mel.

“Miller Time!” I said into the phone now.
“What’s up?”

“Mr. Childs!” Derek said. “I didn’t know if
you’d get reception up there. You guys reach the top yet?”

“We postponed the climb. It was supposed to
rain.”

“It’s not raining here.”

“It’s not here either. Not yet. False alarm,
I guess.”

Derek laughed. “You morons. So what are you
doing now?”

“We’re camping in Aokigahara Jukai.”

“Aokigahara what—? Hold on a sec. Sumiko’s
going nuts.”

While Derek and his Starbucks-employed,
barely legal girlfriend yabbered back and forth, I examined my
right hand again. The pain had dulled, and the little bumps had
turned into white pustules. I touched one with a finger
experimentally. It was hard and uncomfortable. Then Sumiko came on
the line and said, “Ethan? What are you doing in Aokigahara
Jukai?”

“Camping.”

“You shouldn’t be doing that. You should
leave now.”

“We can’t. It’s already dark.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Ghosts, right?”

“You must be careful there. And don’t bring
anything back from there. Okay?”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t. I really don’t think you should
be there.”

She was beginning to freak me out, and I
said, “Can I speak to Derek again.”

Static interference sounded as the phone
changed hands.

“Suicide Forest!” Derek crowed gleefully.
“Awesome. How is it? Have you found any bodies?”

“Listen, I gotta go. I’ll tell you about it
when I get back.”

“If you get back. Kidding, man. Okay,
later.”

I hung up, frowning. What was up with
Sumiko? I got it that this place was taboo for most Japanese, but
she’d sounded downright terrified for us. Did she really believe
the legends associated with the forest? And what was that stuff
about not taking anything from here? Was that part of the folklore
too? Did you get cursed or something?

I stuffed the phone away and went to the
fire.

“Who was that?” Mel asked.

“Derek. His girlfriend thinks we’re crazy
for being here.”

“We are.”

John Scott said, “Heard you were attacked by
some ants, buddy. How you feeling?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good to see you got your pants back
on.”

Nina, I noticed, was staring intently at the
ground, doing a bad job of trying to hide her smile. I was glad it
was dark, because it masked the blush that had risen to my
cheeks.

“You know,” John Scott went on, “I’ve heard
the expression ‘ants in my pants’ before, but I’ve never known
anyone who’s actually experienced it.”

He was grinning broadly, while chuckles
spilled out of everyone else.

“Find anything down the ribbon?” I said, to
change the topic. I felt stupid standing there, the butt of the
joke. I was also pissed they’d been talking about me behind my
back.

John Scott shook his head. “It ended at
nothing. Maybe there was a connecting one at one point. Who
knows?”

I sat down next to Mel, who suggested it was
time for dinner, and everyone took out whatever food we had either
brought from Tokyo or bought at Kawaguchiko station, which was
similar fare to what we had at lunch. John Scott passed several
cans of beer around, apologizing that they were warm. I waved aside
his offer. I would have liked one, but I felt I would owe him
somehow if I accepted.

The fire was comforting, keeping the
night—and the forest—at bay. We fed it with the sticks we had
collected during the trek here and talked about the day: the
ribbons, the solo shoe, the gravesite. John Scott, apparently in
his element with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other,
invented an entire backstory for Yumi. She was a journalist, he
said. She came here to do a story on all the suicides and the
yūrei
. She planned to spend a couple nights. That’s why she
had the change of undergarments, the toiletries. But then she ran
into a man who came here to kill himself. A hesitater. She tried to
interview him and he got angry and killed her—no, better, John
Scott amended—he decided he wanted to fuck her. Nobody was going to
know. Even if they found out, he was going to kill himself, so what
did it matter? So he raped her over and over, hanged her from a
tree branch, then hanged himself next to her. “Bam! It explains
everything,” John Scott concluded proudly. “The underwear. The
missing body.”

“What about the cut-up ID?” I said.

“What ID?”

“Oh shit,” Tomo said. “I don’t show
you.”

He took the small pieces of plastic he’d
collected from his pocket and passed them to John Scott. Ben and
Nina crowded close.

John Scott whistled. “She’s fit.”

“I know, right?” Tomo said. “Why hot girl
suicide?”

Ben said, “Maybe, you know, that is an old
photo. Maybe she was in a fire and was disfigured.”

Nina nodded. “Or she had a brain tumor.”

I glanced at Nina. She’d been reticent all
day, and I believed this was the first time she’d spoken English.
She had aristocratic features, with arched eyebrows, an aquiline
nose, and a neatly composed mouth. She’d pulled her hair back into
a ponytail, and a single strand hung down in front of her face. She
caught me looking. Her eyes were large, brown, almost reflective in
the poor light, like a cat’s—and there was something else in
them.

A mischievousness? A seductiveness? Or was I
imagining that?

Ben said, “I wonder what would be the best
method for suicide?”

“Slitting your wrists,” Nina replied
immediately. “In a hot bath.”

“No way,” John Scott said. “One, it’s pussy.
Two, it takes a while to bleed out like that. If you kill yourself,
you want it to be instant. You don’t want to sit there waiting for
yourself to die. It could take hours. I say sucking on the barrel
of a Glock and pulling the trigger.”

I shook my head. “Most people who try that
end up permanently maiming themselves and spend the rest of their
lives in a wheelchair missing a chunk of their brain.”

John Scott cocked an eye at me. “So what do
you say, boss?”

I gestured vaguely around us. “Hanging
probably.”

“Yeah, and if you don’t do it right, or the
rope breaks, you’re left a paraplegic.”

“I know,” Tomo said. “Jump in front the
train. Splat, you dead.”

“That would be fine for you, Tomo,” Neil
said. “But then you’re forcing your death on someone else, forcing
them to live with the memory of your splattered guts because you
couldn’t kill yourself by yourself. Not to mention the train
company, in Japan at least, will likely sue your surviving kin for
disrupting their service.”

“Well?” I said, wanting to hear Neil’s
theory.

“Jumping off a building.”

“That’s so nineties,” John Scott said. “You
know why no one does that shit anymore?”

“Tell me,” Neil said dryly.

“Because it’s been proven that most people
change their minds about killing themselves halfway down. Imagine
that.”

“How could that possibly be proven?” I
said.

“It has, dude. Check it out.”

“What about an overdose?” Mel said. “That’s
painless, right?”

“Not reliable,” John Scott said. “You pass
out, then vomit all the pills back up. This leaves you alive and in
a puddle of your puke, probably next to your suicide note, which,
given the fact you’re not dead, looks plain gay.”